


Our Cousins Across  the River, or, How Reading Game Theory  Made me a Better Person

by vocativecomma



Category: Fae Tales - not_poignant
Genre: Captivity, Essay, Hurt/Comfort, Meta, Psychology, Slavery, Therapy, Trauma, why I chose to get the hell out of the field of therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 16:30:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1394491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vocativecomma/pseuds/vocativecomma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which I squee over Game Theory, and come to some revelations about recovery narratives and identity  categories along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Cousins Across  the River, or, How Reading Game Theory  Made me a Better Person

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Game Theory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/915296) by [not_poignant](https://archiveofourown.org/users/not_poignant/pseuds/not_poignant). 



> Thanks to Not_Poignant for motivating me to write this, and for looking it over.

A week ago, when Not_Poignant posted the last chapter of Game Theory, I was struck by her author’s notes, in which she stated that her readers’ enjoyment of the story has “helped me get closer to myself as a person, and for all that it’s ‘just erotic fantasy,’ it’s been a profound journey for me.'” I know that Pia was being modest, but it’s hard for me to imagine Game Theory as being “just” anything. I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I didn't read GT for the porn. The sex scenes were expertly written, but what moved me so much more was the careful portrayal of the characters, their negotiations with boundaries and identity categories, and the ways in which they wrestled with the complexities of trauma and healing. Pia’s author’s note incited my curiosity. I began to wonder if, by labeling our work as “just erotica” or “just fantasy” or “just escapist fic,” we are unintentionally minimizing the transformative power and significance of the work we are doing. What would happen if we took a moment to pause and examine why we are drawn to stories like Game Theory, aside from their purely erotic appeal? How do they challenge the dominant discourses that we take for granted and offer other narratives that are more conducive to compassion, empathy, and intimacy? ? More important, if hurt/comfort fanfiction has lessons to teach us, how can we apply those lessons to our daily interactions in the world? I don’t claim to have the answers to any of these questions, but thought I would offer my own story of myself as a fanfiction reader as a means of contributing to the dialog.

Fanfiction as a Source of Alternative Healing Narratives 

For almost ten years, I thought I wanted to be a counselor. I studied psychology, then social work, and finally, marriage and family therapy. In college, I wrote my senior [thesis](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3660943/1/Towards-A-Tentative-Theory-of-Fanfiction)on the therapeutic potential of fanfiction. At that point, I was in lurve with a postmodern approach called narrative therapy, which does bear some resemblance to fanfiction, in that it asks clients to center and “thicken” stories about themselves that have been previously marginalized. During my doctoral studies, however, I soon realized that while narrative therapy claims to be non-hierarchical and nonjudgmental, it’s exactly like all the other models out there. Though its practitioners might claim otherwise, It’s organized into stages, and I’ve seen narrative therapists get really pushy when a client is unwilling to rewrite his or her life narrative in a manner that emphasizes positivity and recovery. In other words, the client’s healing process must run according to the therapist’s timeline (and/or the insurance company’s timeline) rather than his or her own.

 

I could go on and on about my disenchantment with narrative therapy, but my real cataclysmic moments occurred when I worked at a rape crisis center in San Francisco. One of the first things they taught us in training was that the main thrust of the rape crisis movement was for people who had experienced rape to undergo a transformation from viewing themselves as victims to claiming an identity as a survivor. It took me seven months to realize that while survivorhood can be incredibly empowering for some people, the survivor/victim dichotomy can be equally damaging for others. I saw clients who were pathologized (by themselves and by others) for not recovering fast enough, for not viewing themselves as survivors fast enough. Given our culture’s obsession with the suppression of vulnerability, and our seemingly frenetic desire to move forward and refrain from repetition, the prevalence of the victim/survivor dichotomy is not surprising. I felt like I spent most of my time in session watching my clients beating themselves up when they displayed vulnerability at “inappropriate” times, or because they still became easily triggered, even though their rape had happened many years before. I began to contemplate what the lives of these women would be like if they lived in a culture that centered vulnerability, like hurt/comfort fanfiction does. What would it be like if they felt that it would be all right to ask for comfort, or to be taken care of, without fear that they would be judged? Characters in h/c fanfic express their vulnerability all over the place, even in situations where such expressions would appear to be highly improbable, such as a prisoner of war who seeks comfort from his enemy after having a nightmare. Of course, these stories are romanticized, but they also give me hope that humans have the capacity to react to each other differently. I don't believe that terms like "victim," "needy," or "dependent" should always be pajoritive. I find that relationships in fic that revolve around caring, (e.g. the relationship between Gwyn and Augus, or between Augus and Ash), have helped me to reframe these concepts, and have given me permission to embrace how I feel in the moment. 

In addition, fanfiction, by its very definition, challenges notions of permanence and time, because, in essence, fanfic is about playing with tension, rather than resolving or ending it. For this reason, the form of the recovery fic itself interrogates our taken-for-granted assumptions about how long grief or trauma or a broken heart should last. For example, there was something deliciously spacious about the length of Game Theory; there was no rush for either Gwyn or Augus to recover fully. In fact, it was made clear from the outset that though this was a love story, both characters would always have their scars. There are certainly exceptions, but I think the majority of published fiction, when it deals with trauma at all, is heavily skewed towards an ending in which the trauma is fully healed, or at least an ending where the character is able to convince him or herself that it is. (I was not a fan of Wally Lamb's We are Water, partially because it reinforced a dominant, stereotyped view that healing can only happen when we reveal the secret of our abuse, preferably in as dramatic a fashion as possible). It was my experience as a therapist that this rush towards resolution, towards survivorhood, actually created more trauma and shame. (If you are interested in deconstructing the victim/survivor dichotomy, you might want to check out Eminism.org, where Emi presents the intriguing concept of [negative survivorship](http://eminism.org/blog/entry/357).) 

I saw clients who were pathologized by staff for participating in “unhealthy relationships,” supposedly because they sought to re-enact their sexual trauma. One woman waited almost eight weeks before she told me she was into kink, that she was sure that kink came from her abuse history, and that she was ashamed of her desire to submit. By that point, I had been reading fanfiction for years. Obviously, I knew that these stories were fantasy, and were not prescriptive, but I also observed how some characters in hurt/comfort stories were able to find a loving partner with whom they could play out certain elements of their prior abuse in a safe, consensual environment. These weren’t pure re-enactments, exactly, because there was always a crucial difference: the submissive character could always put a stop to the scene, and, on a meta level, the reader could always click the back button and leave the fic, if it proved to be triggering. Unfortunately, the psych world tends to be pretty black and white, so re-enactments (including kinky ones) are often dismissed and labeled as unhealthy, stuck, or repetitive. Therapy is viewed as the only way to truly recover from trauma, so any efforts the client takes to heal from the trauma on her own are usually discounted. I can say that my love of fanfiction impacted my work with this woman for the better. I did not see her as someone who was stuck in an endless loop of repetition. I saw her as a person who was doing the best she could to heal in the way that she wanted to heal. Regardless of their cause, her kinks were nothing to be ashamed of; they were merely another facet of who she was. I envision a world where therapists are given opportunities to learn about kink, so that they can work alongside their clients to evaluate relationships with criteria that are drawn from the client's own values, and not from societal norms. What is "safe" and "healthy" for one person might feel like abuse for another. I don't want to discount the fact that therapy has helped millions of people process their trauma. If you've found an excellent therapist, that's amazing. But if you're one of those people for whom therapy has failed again and again, it might be worth playing with the idea that your engagement with fic is a sort of self-directed therapy. 

Fanfiction as a Renegotiation of Identity Categories 

I find myself in the very strange position of being someone who has been virtually totally blind since birth, but whose dominant means of making sense of the world is visual. I frequently have to remind myself that I’m blind, because even though it’s an indisputable fact, it never really registers. There’s a huge mismatch between my physical body and the messages my brain is sending. I have decided that the word “transabled” best describes me, despite the fact that it is almost exclusively used to refer to people without disabilities who feel that they need them. I am, in effect, a sighted person in a physically blind body. When I try to explain this, people have all kinds of weird reactions. Many simply don’t understand. Others try to tell me that my desire to embrace sighted culture is merely conditioning. And some people in the transgendered community have accused me of appropriating the trans experience to serve my own ends. (I know I need to be really careful when describing myself as being trapped in a blind body because many transgendered folks don’t view their gender that way, and the trapped-in-the-wrong-body-narrative has been used by the media and pop culture to grossly oversimplify their lived experience). I’m sure these reactions can be traced to many different places, but I’d surmise that some of them share a common source: in general, people don’t like boundary-breaking behavior. It freaks them out. If you’re blind, you should just act blind and enjoy your blind superpowers, okay? 

Since I was about five, I’ve been obsessed with stories in which boundaries are shattered. These usually involved instances where a powerful, often villainous character expressed kindness or compassion towards his or her foe. Eric Carl’s A Toad for Tuesday is an excellent example. But G-rated hurt/comfort was a hard genre to come by, so I spent most of my childhood rewriting stories such as Hansel and Gretel and The Little Mermaid. The witches were always unbelievably gentle, and if they ate you up, or took your voice, they always regretted it afterwards, and did their best to make it up to you. I didn’t know it, but these fantasies were my refuge from the powerful adults in my life, who seemed bent on convincing me that my very survival hinged on my ability to stay in my blindness box and like it.

And then I found fanfiction. To my delight, I discovered that in h/c and slavefic communities, boundary-breaking is not just allowed, but is openly celebrated. I am a sucker for that well-worn trope of a master coming to see his slave as more than a possession, and finding ways to honor his humanity. And that’s one of the reasons I love Game Theory so much: watching the captor/captive dynamic between Gwyn and Augus break down gives me hope, because if those two can go from rape and imprisonment to something approximating a relationship (albeit a twisted, complex one), surely there are other people in this world who would be able and willing to understand my transness, to treasure and relate to the sighted parts of me, as well as the blind ones. 

 

I relate on a very personal level to Gwyn, who was forced to spend most of his life playing the role of a Seelie fae, and closeting and silencing the Unseelie parts of himself. It took me until I was twenty to realize that I couldn’t think myself into accepting blindness. Instead of castigating myself for being a bad blind person, I was better off acknowledging my transness and the contradictory nature of my identity. I think Gwyn undergoes a similar process, and so I especially resonated with the scenes where Augus helped him to verbalize his Unseeliness, and to confront the ramifications of his light: the good, as well as the ugly. As I read, I often found myself wishing that I had had an Augus in my life to name my transness into being, though preferably one who wasn’t quite the little shit that Augus was.

I could be reading too much into things, but it seems that Augus’ witnessing of Gwyn’s acknowledgement of his Unseeliness was crucial for the dissolution of the captor/captive dynamic. Gwyn showed Augus so much of his essence, displayed so much vulnerability, and, simultaneously, recognized the vulnerability in Augus, that the power he held over Augus became intolerable. Thankfully, I’ve never had to negotiate for my freedom with a kidnapper, but I have found that the more I am willing to reveal my vulnerability, and to recognize other’s vulnerability in return, the more willing people are to blur that boundary between blind and sighted, and to mirror back to me the sighted person who I see inside myself. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter how many sensitivity trainings people attend, or what politically correct language they use: nothing will change unless we focus on the similarities between us, and not just the differences. And that’s another thing writers of hurt/comfort and slavefic do extremely well. They invite solidarity among the marginalized. It seems like most social movements depend on difference and boundaries to constitute themselves. We talk about the rights of people of color, of people with disabilities, of migrant workers. What seems to be missing is an acknowledgement that yes, these identity categories are crucial, but, shame, degradation, and othering feels much alike, whether you are black or poor or gay or Latino or blind. The dialog might be different, but the overall processes are strikingly the same. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve resonated with scenes in slavefic, where slaves are told to remember their place, or it is assumed that they have nothing to offer, just because they are slaves. It’s incredibly freeing to realize that suffering is suffering, that my experiences aren’t unique to blindness and cannot be entirely attributed to it, that I share a great many things in common with others who have been wrongly categorized.

It makes sense to me that we are territorial about our identity categories, and that we are quick to protest when it feels like someone is trying to appropriate our experience, especially if that person comes from a higher status group. But fanfiction paints a different picture for how things could be. It’s not a picture devoid of identity categories: it’s merely a picture where the boundaries between those categories are a little more diffuse, the hierarchy of privilege and suffering we’ve created isn’t quite as stable, and people from different marginalized groups are more apt to join forces than to accuse each other of appropriation. As Pia so beautifully puts it, this is a world where the Seelie and Unseelie fae are simply “cousins across the river.” 

A Call TO Action

This fall, I will begin my master’s in education at Harvard. My interests are like plot bunnies—numerous and impossible to keep track of—but one of them is fanfiction and it’s potential as an educational and healing tool. I don’t know quite what that would look like yet. Maybe I’ll collect G-rated hurt/comfort stories and read them to wee schoolchildren and see if they help them to develop more empathy. Or maybe I’ll visit therapists’ offices in the middle of the night, and leave reams and reams of h/c fic by the coffeemaker. Whatever path I choose, I don’t want to do it alone. If you are at all interested in any of the ideas I’ve raised here, please contact me (my email address is on my profile). I’d love to hear from you.


End file.
